The poor freemen, expelled from the country and deprived of employment, crowded more and more into Rome, increasing, to a fearful extent, the Roman proletariate. For more than three centuries the best men of Rome, Crassus, Licinius, Emilianus, Drusus, and the Gracchi, made various efforts, to arrest by agrarian laws, the destruction of freeholds, first by the large estates, and then by slaveholders. These efforts were the principal causes of the internal struggles and civil wars of the Roman republic, and their failure proved the destruction of the Roman world. Scipio Æmilianus Africanus prophecied the downfall of liberty and of the Roman state, if this substitution of plantation economy for the old yeomanry and freeholds did not cease. About the year 620 U.C., scarcely any freeholds for yeomen existed in Etruria; and Plutarch says, "When Tiberius Gracchus went through Tuscany to Numantia he found the country almost depopulated, there being scarcely any free husbandmen or free shepherds, but for the most part imported slaves. He then first conceived the course of policy," etc. An account almost precisely similar of the present condition of Virginia may be found in a speech made a few years ago by one of her own sons--one, too, of the most ardent upholders of slavery, whether as governor of the state, as active politician, or as a private citizen. The Roman planter desolated Etruria by devoting it to the breeding of cattle; the Virginian desolates her prolific soil and his own manhood by devoting them to the breeding of "niggers." But here the analogy ceases. The Virginian savior will stand in history the antipodes of the Gracchi. The Roman oligarchs, slaveholders and slave-traders, baffled the sublime efforts of the Gracchi, who attempted not only to preserve but to increase the number of freeholders. The Gracchi were murdered by the oligarchs and the degraded rabble. Publius Scipio Nasica and other senators, fomented and incited Publius Satureius and Lucius Rufus, who, armed with bludgeons or legs of broken chairs, struck down and murdered Tiberius Gracchus. With similar barbarity Senator Sumner was assaulted in his chair of office; and Senators Toombs and Mason, as well as Hons. Keitt and Brooks, had thus their bloody prototypes in Rome. The murder of the Gracchi was applauded by the degraded Roman rabble; so also did the "poor whites" in the South applaud the assault on Sumner, as well as every other act of savage violence perpetrated in Washington or elsewhere in the interests of slavery. The Roman men and matrons, however, did not present _cudgels of honor_ to Publius Satureius and Lucius Rufus.